Introducing the Biblio-Mat!

The Monkey’s Paw dubs itself “Toronto’s most idiosyncratic secondhand bookshop,” a mix of antiquarian treasures, oddities, art installations, and eccentricities of all kinds. Their latest innovation? The Biblio-mat, a vending machine that dispenses random used books. As owner Stephen Fowler told Quill & Quire, “The books in the machine are two dollars each—that’s not enough to make any profit, but the nature of the secondhand book business is that I end up with a lot of books that are interesting and worth keeping and disseminating, but have no practical retail value.”